success and insight
#- Any institution, movement, or ideology that appeals to the priors of wealthy, successful, and powerful men and women — especially those who (or whose families) have attained wealth, success, or power via success in business — will, as a rule, be surpassingly better funded than any institution, movement, or ideology that questions, undermines, or contravenes those priors.
- Success in business, while (in most cases) requiring the development of certain skills and capabilities which bear resemblance to (and may even participate in) important virtues, is not domain-transferable. It offers absolutely no credit or guarantee that the model successfully used — or the businessman or woman who achieved that success — is in any way applicable outside of business.
- Indeed, success in business may indeed blind the successful to their need for the virtues which enable “success” in other fields of life, by leading them to assume that those fields of life all work on roughly the same principles as the business world. Success in business may thus, absent a deep and thorough process of virtue-formation which cannot originate from or primarily take place in the business world, produce wealthy, successful, and powerful men and women who radically lack insight into what is truth.
- The support, or lack thereof, of the wealthy, successful, and power for an institution, movement, or ideology therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the truth of such an institution, movement, or ideology’s core commitments or doctrines. Not only is there definitively no causal relation; there is no necessary correlation whatsoever.
- It is almost defensible, as a result, to say that if one wishes to find truth in an institution, movement, or ideology, one should begin by looking as far as possible from where the wealthy, successful, and powerful congregate — and donate.
this post brought to you partly by a reading of Plato’s Gorgias and Protagoras